Tapster Automates Smartphone App Testing

Tapster is a robotic device to automate testing mobile applications on smartphones. It simulates the touch of a human finger on capacitave touchscreen devices of all kinds.

Tapster is made with Bitbeam, an open-source 3D printable LEGO-Technic compatible building system. It is programmed with Node.js + Johnny-Five + Arduino (Nodebots FTW!).

(Tapster demo video)

Use Tapster to automate apps on mobile devices, such as iPhone or Android. If you're a software developer, any time you change a line of code, you need to check that every important interaction still works in the app on a real device. Sure, you can manually check things yourself, or have your friends and family do it for you a few times, but that gets old quickly. Life is too short for manual testing – have a robot do it for you!

There is something oddly retro about a robotic device that uses its robotic fingers to tap away at an interface designed for human beings. In their 1931 story The Revolt of the Machines, the writing duo of Nat Schachner and A.L. Zagat describe a master machine that stands ready to take over the keyboards in a control center for an entire civilization.

The chief wheeled to the master machine and pressed a button. Instantly, the hundreds of dangling arms telescoped out, each to a button bank where a moment before a prolat had labored. And, with a weird simulation of life, the ten forked ends of each arm commenced a rattling pressing of the buttons. Rapidly, purposefully, the metallic fingers moved over the key-boards, and on the screens we could see that the machines all over the world were continuing on their even course. Not the slightest change in their working betrayed the fact that they were now being directed by a machine instead of human beings.